by Devyn Andrews
May 6, 2025
Nightshining by Jennifer Kabat; Milkweed Editions; 360 pages; $20.00.
I can’t resist a book with an enigmatic title, and Jennifer Kabat’s Nightshining, billed enticingly as “A Memoir in Four Floods,” proved no exception. That idiosyncratic preposition, suggestive of Kabat’s departure from certain conventions of nonfiction, first intrigued me, triggering a barrage of questions. What could it possibly mean for a memoir to be in a flood, let alone four of them? How does this title, evocative of memory and water and words, deluges in literal and idiomatic senses, both unify and inaugurate this work? What role do clouds have in all of this? And how soon could I get a copy?
In Nightshining, Kabat crafts a genre-expansive memoir, blending her personal experience living through multiple floods in Margaretville, New York with her multifaceted research findings on hydrology, weather experimentation, and the region’s history. Exploring internal and external landscapes in equal measure, Kabat’s lyrical and insightful prose moves associatively between past, present, and future, tracing the history of Kabat’s family alongside the history of the land. Throughout this hybrid work, Kabat’s experimental form beautifully mirrors its central and thematic content. Situating human experience within a greater natural context, Kabat likens narrative to water and memory to place, destabilizing the linearity of individual, collective, and non-human time alike.
Early on, Kabat recounts her first flood in Margaretville, describing her town’s physical devastation, collective displacement, and the arrival of the Red Cross, along with mounds and mounds of used clothing. “All of this is a flood,” Kabat writes with admirable ambiguity, and readers get the sense that she is referring not only to the facts and experiences of the flood itself, but the deluge of memory and complex feelings that come with reconstructing it on the page. This line proves instructive for engagement with Kabat’s work, and it is almost as if the book as a whole is one of the floods to which Kabat refers in her title.
In a similar way, much of Nightshining’s content is collaged out of a variety of sources. In Kabat’s flood of memory, her personal experiences live alongside other textual flotsam and jetsam, including archival newspaper articles, family photos, declassified government documents, FEMA forms, excerpts from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and even Kabat’s late father’s “wallet materials.” Readers follow Kabat as she sorts through and connects these disparate threads not into a singular narrative, but a layered and complex tapestry. One notable investigation she undertakes is the Cold War-era development of cloud seeding technology by General Electric near her town, which plays in a role in a disaster locally referred to as the “Rainmaker’s Flood” and is later leveraged in the Vietnam War. Other through-lines include the Indigenous history of the Mohawk Valley, Kabat’s father’s work advocating for co-operative public utilities management systems, and the impact of pollution on the formation of very high-altitude noctilucent clouds, which are only visible from the ground in twilight conditions. The interwoven nature of Kabat’s exploration both contextualizes her personal experiences and de-individualizes the utility of her insights, drawing our attention to the way in which all of our histories, subjective and collective, exist as part of a larger whole.
Perhaps most remarkable is Kabat’s choice to use present tense throughout. She renders scenes from her memory and stories from her childhood as if they were unfolding now; she reports on flood cleanup efforts, historical figures, and ancient glacial movement through the Catskills with a sense of simultaneity. While this compositional move is unconventional for the memoir, Kabat’s first chapter makes clear her choice serves a thematic end: “This summer (and every summer is now this summer) will bring the worst fire season in the West and brushfires in my town,” she writes with urgency and obvious connection to the ever-worsening climate crisis. But beyond the immediate environmental implications of the present tense, there is a sense that embracing non-linearity is part and parcel with Kabat’s central purpose. Rather than recounting her own lived experiences and the history of the land on independent timelines, Kabat entwines these narratives, allowing her readers to follow the thematic currents of her writing across the various forms it embodies. By rendering these narratives concurrent, Kabat also prompts readers to investigate the ways in which the present is always informed by a complex entanglement of histories on subjective and universal scales.
While the chronology of important events throughout Nightshining is at times somewhat difficult for a reader to parse, it seems that Kabat is more concerned about writing as a complex and fluid sense-making artform than a temporally accurate account. Readers are clued into Nightshining’s greater artistic goals when Kabat describes her writing process, reviewing disparate notes she has collected about her father, her town’s connection to GE, different types of clouds, and (of course) floods:
“I lay them next to each other, not chronologically, but as if in proximity I will get some perspective. I read a line
of the German historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s about time cutting though millennia, and how
history exists in the here and now. He writes that events are not “like the beads of a rosary,” and I stare at the
mass of notes…They seem unconnected— or to me they are all connected, but I do not have a language to link
them. How do I summarize the emotional condition of this— whatever this the current moment is? These current
moments spread out over a decade.”
Throughout Nightshining, Kabat muses on the sense that narrative, at least in its more traditional forms, is unable to faithfully fully render the truth she seeks to explore. Perhaps turning to water and the principles of hydrology instead to guide her project, Kabat opts for fluidity over the limitations of formal convention, de-emphasizing the construct of linear temporality to help us recalibrate our all-too-human perspective. Kabat instead carves out valuable space to move associatively through language, highlighting the interconnectedness of lived experience, social and political history, and the natural landscape.
Nightshining offers an inventive take on the memoir, and Kabat’s multi-scaled histories flow together into a coherent whole. Time and form are fluid in Kabat’s impressive accomplishment of a book, which underscores the inevitability of change and offers an alternative vision of a more harmonious collective future. And throughout her investigations into memory and place, Kabat always writes how water moves—at times, in trickles, at others, in a deluge—towards some future equilibrium, if only for a moment.
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Swimming in Currents: Water, Words, and Time in Jennifer Kabat’s Nightshining
NONFICTION
Image by Kaushal Moradiya from Pexels
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Devyn Andrews is a graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago Program for Writers. Her work has been published in Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. Previously, she lived in Boston and Sacramento.
